


Crawl 'til dawn

by piggy09



Series: Obscure Word Fics [18]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 08:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3481349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cosima, and Delphine, and memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crawl 'til dawn

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt on Tumblr:  
> "Cophine | Keta: an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past."
> 
> This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful blonde!

Later, she will remember this: Cosima’s form draped across the bed like the sweaters that are now too big on her – a skin for a different set of bones. A skin from back when the world was new.

But that remembering will happen later, much later, when Cosima is gone and Delphine is gone too. For now she stands in the doorway of their DYAD-gifted apartment and watches the breath sigh in and out of Cosima’s chest. Cosima, she knows, is a seaside child – raised in the fog and salt water of San Francisco. This is the sort of air that rusts metal, draws streaks of blood against even the strongest things. Cosima could not have been metal to survive it.

Metal is all Delphine knows. After all, she comes from a country reduced to an Eiffel Tower paperweight on a desk, the spidery security of metal laced together. She walks to Cosima’s lab from the gleaming steel-glass corridors of the DYAD’s newer building, like an ambassador from some cold steel cage. She reaches with her metal hands and dreams that they can build an armor that encases the heartbreaking fragility of Cosima’s spine – Cosima does not rust, but she wilts in on herself like living things do. Delphine’s spine screams iron, and she reaches with her metal hands and metal lips.

It is Cosima’s breath that tastes like metal, though. This is the sort of air that rusts.

On the bed Cosima’s breath catches and rattles, and Delphine takes a step forward from the door – aborted – but no, she settles again. Curls in on herself. Delphine loves her. This seems like a simple fact, but really it is not at all. Cosima is asleep on their shared bed, on top of the covers, clad in a skin that sags like it has already given up. Cosima is asleep, and her breath rattles, and she is sick, and Delphine loves her, and. and. and. You’d think a scientist would be comforted by facts.

Delphine bites her lip to swallow down a sob – it tastes like sea air, not rust – and but on the bed Cosima wakes up anyways, her eyes bird-bright in the paper-mache mask dying has made of her face.

She says,

* * *

Later, she will remember this: how easily the two of them fit together, and how solid and reassuring Delphine’s heartbeat sounds where Cosima’s ear is pressed to her chest. This is before Cosima stops taking comfort in chests, stops assuming that the drumbeat of a heart means anything like living. This is before she watches Jennifer stare at the camera as her boyfriend brushes a kiss across her forehead. This is before she understands what it is like, how snugly that expression fits on her face.

This is before, when Cosima still trusts.

(This is before Cosima will rust.)

Delphine’s spine curved around Cosima’s is something like a safe harbor. Her skin smells like scented lotion and Cosima can see it, like an image leaping into her mind from some unknown and distant past. She closes her eyes tight, breathes in vanilla and honey, dreams of a future when someday Delphine’s lotion sits next to their bed and Delphine curls into herself to smooth it on every night, the curve of her legs shining and pale in the dark. Cosima dreams of a time when she knows every inch of Delphine’s skin, each freckle and mole a story, a jumping-off point to say, _Hey, remember this?_ Delphine’s hand smoothes up and down Cosima’s back, absentmindedly, and Cosima cannot trust her. Should not trust her. Delphine’s hands will reach into Cosima and claw her apart, break her into DNA strands and tiny miraculous cells. Delphine will reach with her metal hands and brush scalpel-kisses across Cosima’s skin.

But: _Delphine_ , Delphine Delphine Delphine. Cosima can’t trust her, but her name on Cosima’s tongue is so sweet.

* * *

She can’t remember the last time she sees Cosima. Was it when she collapsed onto Cosima’s sickbed, the taste of betrayal heavy as wine on her tongue, and sobbed _I’m so sorry_ until Cosima told her she forgave her? It seems like a fitting end to them, Delphine bereft, Delphine clinging to Cosima’s bones although they are too fragile to support her. Delphine begging _please, please, please_.

What she remembers most – if there is one image, one picture – is Cosima’s eyes. Above the cannula and set in her pale skin they had glittered gold and brown. Autumn is not the warmest season, not the coldest, and it contains the death of things – but autumn brings the sort of death that leads to rebirth. Autumn is bursts of color, bleeding reds and golden browns. Autumn is decay and it is hope and – it means something, Delphine is sure, that Cosima’s eyes were so bright.

_What have you done_ , Cosima asked her, weary _._ Well, what hasn’t she. What burdens are there left to lay at Cosima’s feet, anyways.

Eventually Delphine had ended up curled across Cosima’s lap like a child, legs dangling coltish off of the edge of the bed. She murmured promises that she would fix things, get Kira out, save Sarah, save Cosima, I am so sorry, I love you, please, I love you, I am sorry, all the words tangled up on Delphine’s tongue. They all mean the same thing anyways. She thinks – she hopes – Cosima understands. Understood. Understood.

The real crime is this: Delphine does not remember what Cosima said back.

So maybe that’s not the last time Delphine saw her. Couldn’t have been. What sort of ending is that?

Was it when Delphine had ducked out of the lab, leaving Cosima huddled in her sweater and her ill-fitting skin on the edge of her bed? Had she brought Cosima coffee? She does not remember, licks her lips but can’t taste any remnant of caffeine passed between closed-mouth kisses. She spends all of her time obsessing about this, now, that one last time.

(The thought she refuses to consider: was seeing Rachel the last time she saw Cosima? Of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been.

She would say the world could not possibly be that cruel. She would say that, if she could believe it.)

In her head she rewrites it – whatever, _whatever_ that frustratingly lost moment is – grabs Cosima’s frail hands between her own two good ones and says all the things she’d meant to. The script changes each time she closes her eyes, _I love you, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry, I, you, I, you, love, sorry, love._ It is a morse code tattoo on the back of Delphine’s eyelids, a heartbeat that she does not deserve. In her mind what matters is that she is able to force it out; that Cosima knows. She doesn’t have to forgive Delphine. She doesn’t have to love Delphine back. Delphine only wanted her to know. To understand.

But no: she is gone, and Cosima is gone, and she is gone. There is no ending. Only this, Delphine living each day – a trailing-off, a voice slowly bleeding (bleeding) into a murmur until it eventually becomes silent.

* * *

The last time Cosima sees Delphine, it is a dream. They all are these days. Cosima presses her hand to her chest sometimes to feel the way her heart is rattling along like a piece of broken-down machinery, each second capricious – some longer than others, some trickling through her hands like sand-grains. She wakes with the taste of sand on her tongue, gold and gold and gold. Hourglasses and deserts, places you walk for miles without ever catching a glimpse of the sea. She does not dream of deserts, but she dreams of Delphine and on her worst days she is unable to tell the difference.

(She remembers this: the way tear tracks on Delphine’s face were bright with glittering promises of salt, after that kiss, that dizzy giddy kiss and the way they had tumbled into Cosima’s bed laughing. The tears seemed jarring, after that; that’s probably why Cosima remembers them. She had wanted to take Delphine to the sea someday, kiss her with sea-salt air on both of their lips. Right then, right there, lying next to Delphine in her bed on what she thought would be the first of many times, she thought about kissing Delphine’s lips. Dreamed about the taste of salt. Later she kissed Delphine again, and again, with the sudden giddy freedom of being able to; Delphine’s lips had tasted like ice cream, milk and sugar and pure sweet things. Cosima did not realize, at the time, that this was the lie of Delphine.)

(Delphine remembers it differently. She had crawled back into bed after rifling through Cosima’s files, her life, and licked her lips over and over again. She kept biting them. She was that nervous – or that terrified, if there was a difference. Her lips tasted like salt and metal and rust.

Delphine remembers it differently. Delphine remembers that salt air eats metal, that it corrodes. Cosima only remembers the joy of the sea.)

Usually in Cosima’s dreams Delphine says, _I will never leave you_ , or _I am coming home_ , or _you are so brave and so strong and so beautiful and I love you, I love you, I love you._ The last time Cosima sees her Delphine looks at her like a weary lioness from the edge of the bed.

_I’m sorry,_ she says. _I love you, and I’m sorry_.

Cosima would croak forgiveness but she is past the point, now, of being able to speak. Her lips are glued shut by old blood. Delphine keeps talking anyways, an unintelligible garble: _I, you, I, you, love, sorry, love_. The syllables roll under her accent like some wild thing you could have never hoped to tame.

When she says _Cosima_ the syllables are strange; Cosima can’t tell if she is saying _sea_ or _come see._ She thinks she likes _come see_ better, the way some promise is bright behind Delphine like a sun.

Cosima has been too weary to move for a long time, and Delphine is not real, but Cosima lifts her hands anyways and holds Delphine’s in hers. Delphine says it again, _come see_ , and the last thing Cosima sees before she closes her eyes is the shine of Delphine like the sun.

* * *

“Come here.”

Delphine does, because she is powerless to stop herself. Even as she crosses the room, dreamlike pendulum steps, there is a part of her cataloguing each creaking cracking syllable to see if Cosima is better. Worse. Dying, yet.

In the bed it is too easy to fold herself around Cosima – it always has been – and she cradles the fragile collection of bones and bleeding that is her love.

(Cosima is not her first love, and Cosima is not her only love. Of people, though – maybe. There is no person who can reach Cosima, her spark, even though she is now beginning to gutter like a candle. Even when Cosima is finally gone, there will be no one who can match her in Delphine’s mind. Cosima is the only one.)

The air smells like vanilla and honey above the faint antiseptic smell that may originate from the apartment or one or both of them. Last night Delphine sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed lotion into her legs and Cosima had begun to laugh, a noise that sounded like her throat was cracking. Delphine couldn’t find that one frail, teetering second when the laughter became sobs instead but then Cosima was crying, wheezing tears and blood into Delphine’s shoulder. _What,_ Delphine asked, _what’s wrong,_ and Cosima had said _I’ll tell you later._

(Later, she will remember this:)

Cosima stirs faintly when Delphine wraps herself around her, pretending that her own skin is anything like the armor she dreamed of building. When Cosima stirs, though, it is only to wrap her hand around Delphine’s own.

“We will find a cure,” Delphine says, and it would be out of nowhere except that is all they are thinking nowadays; Cosima’s illness stretches itself out to fill the space where words should be. “There is _hope_.”

Cosima says nothing, and her fingers creak back and forth between Delphine’s.

“I keep remembering things,” she rasps, “like – like the saying, you know, your life flashing before your eyes?” (Her voice goes up at the end, a little, and in that single syllable there is an aching and infinite fear.) “But it’s happening in slow motion. Everything – everything reminds me of something else. The beach with my parents, or, like, high school.”

“Nobody wants to relive high school, Delphine,” she whispers, shooting for cheery and instead grazing melancholy. Delphine can feel the intake of breath shuddering through her ribs as she tries to say something else but what emerges from her mouth is blood, hot and violent. Delphine lets her go so she can fumble violently for a tissue, cough into it in a firework of red.

“I’m scared,” Cosima says, words dripping from her mouth like blood does, too fragile – something that should never be bared to the sun. The moment for Delphine to say something reassuring rushes in and passes her and she is left with an open empty mouth. What does she say? It will be alright? She is not Jennifer’s monitor, she will not give Cosima (the words in Cosima’s bitter voice, overbrewed tea and morning breath) _false hope_. There is hope, Delphine knows, Delphine _knows_ , but—

She reaches out, and puts a hand on Cosima’s shoulder. Doesn’t say anything. The bones of Cosima bump up against Delphine’s skin, and Cosima turns to look at her, eyes vulnerable and afraid. _I’m sick, Delphine_. If only an embrace could fix anything. If only Delphine could remake her skin and bones into the armor Cosima deserves.

“I was thirteen,” Cosima says in a soft high voice, “the first time I kissed a girl.” She pauses, lets out a hysterical sound that could be a laugh. “It sucked. I don’t know why I’m thinking about it.”

“My first kiss was in a park,” Delphine murmurs, and Cosima looks at Delphine like she is drowning and Delphine is her only lifeline. As if memories, a string of images, could keep Cosima alive.

Delphine remembers it like this: the sun was setting, and her hands were cold where he gripped them. They kissed under a sunset that spilled red light across their lips and skin. At the time, she would think of wine with a sixteen-year-old’s daring.

This is not what she says. She says, “Too much tongue.” Cosima huffs a laugh and sways into Delphine, letting Delphine hold her upright. She laughs into the skin between Delphine’s shoulder and neck, and her breath paints Delphine’s skin. Delphine loves her. This has never stopped being true. She wraps her arms around Cosima and holds her, tries to let herself have hope.

Later, she will remember Cosima like this: happy.

**Author's Note:**

> Sapphire Trans-Am high-beams in rain  
> Drive wild broncos down the plain  
> Push up to the corner where the turbines hiss  
> Someday we won't remember this
> 
> [...]
> 
> Feast like pagans, never get enough  
> Sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men  
> And when the sun comes, try not to hate the light  
> Someday we'll try to walk upright
> 
> Crawl 'till dawn  
> On my hands and knees  
> Goddamn these bite marks  
> Deep in my arteries  
> \--"Damn These Vampires," The Mountain Goats
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please leave kudos + comments if you enjoyed!


End file.
